Cultural Changes of Feature Flagging vs Branching: Defrag X

I was honored to give a talk at Defrag X on “The cultural changes of feature flags vs feature branching”. Feature flags initially enabled developers to separate deployment from release. Now an entire organization (product, marketing, sales, customer success) can shift from a waterfall way of thinking to a more iterative, customer- centric release. Afterwards, I was thrilled by how many people came up and said they appreciated my talk.

When I first started LaunchDarkly, I met with an Engineering Director, who was excited about feature flags but was still on a six month release cycle. That same Engineering Director was at Defrag. He’s now at a different company with a quicker release cycle and is ready to move forward with feature flags. I’m happy that as release cycles get quicker and quicker, so to does the need for feature flag management.

Thanks to Defrag for ten years of great conferences, with even a bonus snow appearance.

Edith is CEO & cofounder of LaunchDarkly. She has more than 10 years of experience in product, engineering and marketing with both consumer and enterprise startups. She was Product Director at TripIt, where she launched TripIt for Business and ExpenseIt. She holds two patents in deployment. Edith earned a BS, Engineering from Harvey Mudd College and a degree in Economics from Pomona College. She enjoys trail running distances up to 100 miles.